Kate and Emma (15 page)

‘It’s only Emma.’ I seldom heard Kate so polite and wheedling. ‘You’ve seen Em before.’

‘Yes indeed. She tried to take my census. I told her. I told her straight out.’

‘She’s got a new job now,’ Kate said soothingly, for we have never been able to eradicate the first impression of me as a field worker for market research. ‘She takes care of people who are dying from cancer of the lung, and she’s been on duty all day without a meal. So may I?’

‘That’s different then.’ Mrs Marbles stepped aside and let Kate in with the pie-dish. She is dead keen on lung cancer. She once reported a man who merely took out a cigarette and looked at it wistfully in a non-smoker, and Bob has to smoke sitting on the window ledge with his head out into the street, because she can smell tobacca through the keyhole, even though they never let her into their room.

I have a vast handbag, which I bought last year when we flew to Spain, to cheat that girl in the fore-and-aft hat who weighs the luggage, and I had it this evening with beer bottles in the bottom, wrapped in newspaper. It is absurd to be so afraid of Mrs Marbles, because she can’t put them out until the baby comes, and probably not even then if they sit tight, but the landlady trauma is part of the game that Kate still plays with life. If you live in lodgings, there is always an ogre downstairs, so Mrs Marbles has to be it.

She is only playing at being married to Bob. She treats him like a pet, giving him caresses or orders according to whim, and talking about him when he’s there as if he could not understand more than a tone of voice. If he makes a sensible remark, which he does at times because he has taken to reading other bits of the newspaper besides the sports page and the comic strips, now that he is a man of status, she either turns it into a joke, or repeats it with amused wonder, like a mother with a bright baby.

He doesn’t seem to mind. He is happy to have Kate there all the time, and I don’t think he knows what marriage means. Does she? Do they know it is for life? Up there in the chequerboard room under the gables with the bed made into a couch and all the coloured cushions that Molly gave them to brighten the place up thrown on the floor for a seat under the window, they are not the Babes in the Wood, but Peter and Wendy in the tree house, and when the curtain comes down, all the children will clap and go home to tea.

When Kate went downstairs to get the macaroni cheese out of the oven, Bob was a little gay on beer. It doesn’t take much with him. I had not been alone with him since that abortive conversation on the bus when I was looking for Kate, and I had no idea what we should say. He was sitting on the window-sill, blotting out the violet evening with his round sweatered shoulders, drumming
his fingers on his knees and looking at me with his head one side and his thick black eyebrows up, as if he were waiting for me to go into a dance.

‘Kate looks well,’ I said, for want of anything else.

‘Kate’s too big,’ he said, and laughed. ‘She’ll look better when she’s had my baby.’

‘That’s a bit unfair,’ I said, and he agreed, ‘Yes.’ Unable to sit opposite his tilted grin, I got up and went to fix my hair at the mirror on the wall. To my helpless surprise and undying horror, he attacked me from behind like a man-eating gorilla and bore me down with him on to the bed.

It was just about the most horrible thing that has happened to me so far in my life, although there may be more as my acquaintance widens, and to make it worse, Kate came puffing in while I was still struggling to get him off me.

He was her husband after all, but she walked to the table, put down the hot dish, licked her fingers and said without even turning round: ‘Oh, come on, Bob. Stop acting up and get your supper while it’s hot.’

He got up with his hair all over his face and shambled over to the table like a tame bear.

‘He went for me,’ I said, sitting up and looking for hairpins. ‘That filthy beast, he went for me. Do something. Scream at him. Hit him. Kill him.’

‘Oh, let the poor thing alone.’ Kate began to ladle out great sticky spoonfuls of my macaroni. ‘It’s hard for a man,’ she said with the complacent pursed mouth of years of experience. ‘He can’t get near me now, poor soul.’

‘You’re just as disgusting as he is.’

‘All in good fun, Em.’

I looked at her, and saw with loathing the face of the Kate of my father’s court, common, cheap, uncivilized, come back to taunt me for my crazy attachment. God! I pinned up my hair roughly and lunged for the door, leaving them sitting on either side of the low table like brother and sister playing tea parties.

‘You’ve forgotten my empties,’ Bob said.

I slammed out of the front door, collided with the drug runner at the garden gate and felt the gun concealed at her hip, and
pounded off down the hill, jarring the joints of my knees. Like a fool, I looked back and saw Kate under the gable waving at me, a white face in the window like an imprisoned child.

EM HAS NEVER said anything about the money. I was afraid she might, that time when she ran off in a rage. I was afraid that Bob and I had messed it up for good and proper, and all I would know of her would be a demand note for fifty quid. But of course, being Em and me, we came together again like the bits of mercury when I used to break the thermometers at the nursing home and nothing said.

I had meant to keep it, well, some of it anyway, and pay it back, but somehow it all got spent. An operation, she said. I didn’t know they could. New skin. But that was in that other life, back when anything was possible. When I could still even go to Butt Street to steal toy soldiers. Even think about - about them there without having to go down to the toilet and heave.

I heaved because of Sammy. It was all his fault. I heaved all the time I was carrying him, and everyone says that’s not right, and one day I’ll ask him: How would you like to have someone inside you pushing your guts up into your throat with those fat rubber fingers?

When he was being born, he tried to kill me, but of course they didn’t let him at the hospital. That’s what they’re for. A surprisingly easy time with that small pelvis, the doctor said. The strange young one who wasn’t anything like my Doctor Watts, who calls me Childie.

‘Where’s Doctor Watts?’

‘He’s on another case. Bear down, dear.’

Bear down your bloody self. A nice easy time, he said, with the spectacles catching the light so you couldn’t see his give-away know-nothing eyes, and he didn’t even flinch when I told him what he could do with it, so I never knew if I’d said it, or only in the dream that took me away round the corner of the road.

When I saw Sammy, he looked so funny that I only felt surprised.
I didn’t think I’d like him, but I do quite. He is so helpless. If it wasn’t for me, he’d die. Have you thought of that? Animals get on their feet and get out and hunt for food, but a baby would just quietly starve to death while you sat and looked at him, if sat was all you did. Not quietly. Sammy yells louder than Loretta used, when she was tiny, and Bob or I come hastening with the bottle, his willing slaves.

He is king all right. Samuel Dean Thomas, after Bob’s father. No harm, he’s got to be called something. Bob’s mother has written she may come over, and she’d better have her return fare, that’s all, but I envy her, I really do, what she will see. The proud boy-father, working overtime to get more of the good things of this world for his son. The radiant young mother, scarce more than a child herself, with her ash-blond hair falling softly on the shoulders of the loose blue gown (Joan gave me that, you’d never credit her with the taste) as she bends tenderly over the tiny morsel in the gaily painted cot.

Em gave me the cot. She has her own flat now, the one we would have shared, but I have mine, two rooms, kitchen and bath on the fifth floor. I have never lived so high, and Bob loves it. He has made a bird feeder outside the bedroom window, very ingenious. He only likes the little birds, so it’s on a spring, and when the pigeons and crows perch on it, the lid shuts down on the food. But the sparrows and starlings sit there and peck away and the big ones sit on the ledge with their feathers ruffled up, like people who can’t get into heaven.

Old Marbles cried when we left. She
cried.
I felt like Princess Margaret and them with the baby in a shawl, and we had a taxi, and one of Bob’s mates from work brought our stuff round in his van. There isn’t much. What Bob had, and a few old bits that Moll gave me, but Bob’s getting a raise and I’m going out to work soon and we’ll save to get more. This old cow two doors along the balcony, she watched our stuff going in - and her face! She is a spy from the Council, put there to see you don’t grow cucumbers in the bath. She looks at me as if I was dirt, so anything that’s gone bad, I sneak along and put it in her bin.

THE GIRL IN my flat is not at all like Kate, and living with her is not anything like it would have been with Kate and the baby. Time has dulled the worst of the hurt, but I still feel bereft, as if something had been taken away from me forcibly, like Alice felt after her miscarriage.

The miscarriage of my too-eager girlish plans has left me somewhat less girlish, I hope, though no less eager to find something that will appease the hunger of living only for yourself. Perhaps I shall take up good works after all, and be Miss Emmaline Bullock, whose wonderful work among, etc., etc., is such an inspiration to, etc., etc.

Meanwhile I have Lisa. She is large and soft with squashy upper arms and fine silky hair hanging like curtains on either side of her untroubled face. She is not the kind who follows you about all over the flat and waits outside the bathroom like a dog, talking about herself through the door, but she is the kind who goes for group fun, rather than couples, and she is always bothering me to be a group.

When Lisa goes out, I would rather enjoy having the flat to myself, eating smoked fish and things she doesn’t like, washing my hair and trailing about with it spread on my shoulders to dry like hemp, touching and feeling the backs and arms of furniture and rejoicing: You are mine. Temporarily mine, but when it is your first own place, a furnished flat seems completely yours, down to the last incredible vase, the last stainless steel teaspoon of a pattern no sane person would choose, or even be able to find.

But Lisa says: ‘Colin and I are going to the new Italian film. How about getting someone and making it a four?’ As if she were going to play golf or bridge instead of fiddle around a little in the cinema, and have a bit of a go in the back or front of the car, depending on who is driving. To her, the other couple are not superfluous, but in some way necessary. I have figured out that it is because she doesn’t really enjoy it as much as she thinks she ought, and so she has to convince an audience that she does, like near-impotent men who talk about it all the time.

If I have been out by myself and I come back and find her on the slippery red sofa with Colin or the Hairless Mexican or the
Frenchman with the jodhpur boots, she says: ‘Don’t go away,’ when I back out. ‘Stay and talk.’

I don’t. I don’t go much to the kind of parties that Lisa haunts in her quest to prove something or other to herself. They are slightly more advanced versions of the teenage romps I used to go to along our road, with the voyeurist mothers. Nothing to do but fall over bodies unless you are one yourself.

There are disadvantages to Lisa, but it could be worse. My parents like her because her father has been made a baronet for completing some Government defence job without being accused of homosexuality, so there are no arguments at home and no atmosphere when my mother comes to the flat. She comes sometimes ‘on her way home from shopping’, although Fulham is by no imaginable route on the way from Knightsbridge to Charing Cross.

Lately she has been coming more often. Lisa gets home first because she is a civil servant, and I find my mother drinking sherry with her when I get back. Once my mother came up just to see me. She had not been shopping or having lunch with my father or seeing any friends. ‘I just felt I wanted to see you,’ she said, and put out her hand and touched me, as if she wanted to make sure that I was real.

There is a sadness about her that I think was always there, but I notice it more clearly now that I am away from her. If her object in coming to the flat is to make me feel bad about leaving home, then she succeeds.

When I have children, I shall be delighted when they become independent. I shall cut loose and travel to weird places and cast off the conventions I stuck to so that they wouldn’t be ashamed of me.

I shall begin a new life. But my mother behaves as if hers were over. Alice in Birmingham. Peter drowned. Me in Fulham. We have all let her down.

Lisa pays fair shares of everything, and does her share of the work. She is an amiable girl with the inherent lovableness of a big ambling dog, so although I usually turn down her pleas for foursomes, I agree just often enough to show goodwill.

I usually bring Derek, since he is as celibate at the moment as
I am. We are both in a rather sad patch, and we spend quite a lot of Uncle Mark’s time in the office discussing what is wrong with us.

One evening before Easter, it was suddenly as warm as summer, after a belated bitter spell when Kate’s baby had been in the hospital with bronchitis because she left him out in the sun and the sun moved, and Lisa and I had to stuff the pillow back in the broken window again.

She knows a boy called Bernie whose parents have a summer cottage on the river, and we would all go there in Derek’s car and take food and drink and possibly stay the night, if Bernie thought he could do it without his parents finding out.

‘So what if they do?’ Derek said scornfully, and I didn’t let him down by giving away how puritanical Uncle Mark is. Derek and Nell do more or less what they like, as long as they don’t ask him beforehand or tell him afterwards. He does not want to know what goes on in our world, and there are times when I don’t blame him.

The cottage is at the end of a rutted muddy lane between flat wet fields, part of an old estate which was once a dairy farm. The original house was burned down, but several little white-washed houses have been made out of the sheds and dairies and cowmen’s cottages. Bernie’s cottage squats on the sodden ground like a mushroom, with a roof too big for it hanging down all round. It used to be the gate house, although now there are no gates, and the other houses are farther on down the puddled tree-hung lane that used to be the drive.